I completed my 3rd and final talk at ApacheCon this morning, which was More Apache Maven Best Practices. The talk went well – a number of points that are worth reiterating, though perhaps a little too well known to the seasoned Maven users. I managed to put at least one Maven developer to sleep in the process.

It’s been a busy conference, having done the full day training on Tuesday and a short status update presentation on NMaven at the fast feather track, as well as catching up with other Apache folk and quite a few Maven developers. Our BOF was very well attended.

With the formalities over I’m hoping to have the time to post a few updates and get down to a bit of coding face to face that I missed out on at the hackathon.

I’ve got a busy conference this year. Firstly on November 4, there is a full day training entitled Apache Maven, End-to-end:

This training session will walk through the lifecycle of developing a typical Java application from creation to deployment, and show how to use Apache Maven most effectively to manage the build and development process. In addition to the fundamental building blocks of the project, the session will cover testing, day-to-day development in the IDE, setting up documentation, tracking development reports and practices, application of Maven best practices, effective dependency management, and establishing a release process. Effective use of continuous integration (illustrated with Apache Continuum) and repository management (using Apache Archiva) as a part of development infrastructure for team and enterprise environments will be demonstrated. This course will be suitable both for those that are looking to get the most out of their existing Maven projects, and those that are looking to use Maven for the first time.

It should be a great and informative day, with the material aimed to offer most to the intermediate Maven user, while still being appropriate for Maven beginners.

I’ll also be presenting More Apache Maven Best Practices, the how-to talk for keeping your Maven use simple, successful, and avoiding Maven pitfalls. I’m planning to recap the important topics from my talk last year, and cover additional topics like integration testing and documentation.

The usual high quality line up of talks is available this year. And of course, there’s always time to hang out at the hackathon, and get together with committers and get involved.

I’m also joining the volunteer event after the conference to help continue some of the rebuilding work in New Orleans – which I’m expecting to be a very productive day spent away from the laptop for a worthy cause.

This is my first trip to New Orleans, though I hear from everyone that it is a beautiful place. I hope to see many a Maven user there! There are still discounted rates until the end of the month, so it is worth signing up soon.

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Back in late June, I was able to attend the Philippine Open Source Summit in Cebu. It was another good trip, both for the conference and the opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues.

The conference itself was very well attended, so it is great to see that level of interest in open source in the Philippines, and to meet a number of people involved in communities there. I hope that events like this are an encouragement to grow both individual and commercial involvement in open source in the region.

There were a number of technology-specific sessions as well, and I enjoyed catching Webtide’s Greg Wilkins giving an overview of Jetty and Deng Ching giving an overview Maven, Archiva and Continuum. Also presenting from Exist were Ludwig (Pentaho) and Erle (Eclipse plugin development), and though I was unfortunately only able to catch the last portions of each talk I’m reliably informed they went well.

I spoke there about Open Source Communities, and chose to discuss the model used at the Apache Software Foundation, and to share a few of my opinions on why it works so well, when it does. It was actually billed as a panel, sharing a time slot with two other speakers. Rather than the usual back and forth discussion, it was set up as a series of 15 minute speaking slots followed by a joint Q & A. My talk went well despite the usual hiccups with video, microphones and a partially failed attempt to introduce myself in Tagalog.

There were a number of good questions asked in our segment. The most interesting, and hardest, was the question of whether there was a challenge for Filipinos to get involved in open source projects coming from a predominantly non-confrontational culture. This can be a real difficulty, particularly as many projects are based around decision-making structures that involve public disagreement. However, my belief is that in a meritocratic open source community, respect built on accumulated merit should balance this out – and certainly in my experience, Pinoy culture emphasises respect and a non-egocentric demeanour, which makes a very valuable addition to the dynamics of an open source community.

Of course, in reality, communities are never perfect, and it comes down to individual personalities. Speaking more generally, I’d always encourage anyone to participate when they feel they have something useful to offer. If they are unable, or uncomfortable, to do that in a particular project, they have the choice to try and change it from within, or invest energy elsewhere. It’s the responsibility of the members of a project themselves to ensure they do not have any invisible barriers to participation for contributors who could make very valuable technical contributions – and it is their loss otherwise. After all, the "open" in open source is about more than just the code!

Anyway, no trip to Cebu is complete without discussing the food. We ate at a couple of old favourites there, but another stand out was a small group of us getting all-you-can-eat Japanese. I’m still recovering 3 weeks later! Good times.

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It’s day 2 of the main part of the conference here at ApacheCon, and I had a couple of presentations to give, the slides of which are now online. The first was on Apache Maven Best Practices, which went quite well – though first up in the morning is tough (both the speaker and attendees lack the prerequisite amount of caffeine). Many people came in mid-session, of course having missed all the best jokes and self-deprecating Maven humour. Too bad!

Book

Coverage of intermediate Apache Maven concepts with a focus on best practices and "tying it all together". Significant coverage of automated build and repository management concepts, illustrated using Apache Continuum and Apache Archiva.